Development of Robot Combine Harvester for Beans using CAN Bus Network

A robot combine harvester for beans was developed using CAN Bus network. Two sensors are connected to the CAN Bus; a RTK-GPS to locate the position, and a GPS Compass to detect the heading direction. This robot is programmed to perform autonomous operation such as moving forward, backward, and turning in right angle. When the robot was tested in harvesting soybeans on a 100m × 30m rectangular field, the deviations between the target path and the robot's traveling path was approximately 0.07m RMS, and the yaw angle error was approximately 1.82° RMS along the long side of the field. Therefore this robot can work autonomously along the target path without overlapping and shortening. In addition, this robot can unload harvested grain to adjacent transport truck during harvesting operation, which improved harvesting capacity to approximately 10%.